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Lowell school board backs plan to ease space crunch

By Ed Hannan, Sun Correspondent

Updated:
12/05/2013 06:36:20 AM EST

LOWELL -- The School Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a pair of recommendations of its facilities subcommittee that will address the district's space crunch at an estimated cost of $522.5 million.

The three-member facilities subcommittee on Nov. 25 unanimously approved the recommendation to address the K-8 space crunch at a cost of $277.1 million: build a pre-kindergarten-through-grade 8 school on a 14.3-acre site on Carlisle Street in Chelmsford that is owned by the city; renovate the Robinson, Wang and Daley middle schools; build an addition/renovation to the Rogers School; and repair/renovate the rest of the city's 29 school buildings.

The facilities subcommittee also unanimously approved a renovation/expansion of the current Lowell High School site at a cost of $245.4 million.

The high-school project would involve acquiring adjacent land, constructing a new academic wing; demolishing one classroom wing; building a new café, gym, core and common areas; demolishing the fieldhouse; renovating the 1890/1922 building with a freshman wing, possibly re-purposing the freshman academy; and would offer open land for athletics; and the possibility of constructing two similar houses.

The project will take place over multiple phases, which will take longer, but allow LHS students to inhabit newly constructed areas while renovations take place in different parts of the school.

The plan adopted by the full School Committee is the same plan the Lowell Plan suggested at the beginning of this process.

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Projections show the city's elementary and middle schools will be overcrowded by 2,500 students over the next decade, and an aging Lowell High School lacks the space to house an estimated 3,900 students who will inhabit it in coming years.

In an attempt to find a solution, the School Committee earlier this year hired Acton-based OMR Architects Inc. to conduct a comprehensive facilities assessment of the 29 school buildings.

OMR spent the past six months studying the condition of each school. Assessments included evaluating the feasibility of expanding each building and whether it would make more sense to build new schools or renovate existing structures.

One option considered would have split Lowell High School into two separate high schools, but there were more drawbacks than positives to that concept, including lack of available parking spaces, sentiments of a "have/have not" mentality and increased transportation costs which led to that option not going forward, officials said.

The School Committee will now meet with the City Council and schedule a series of community presentations while drafting applications for Massachusetts School Building Assistance funding.

It will take MSBA an estimated six to nine months to review the application and decide how much funding Lowell should receive.

"It's important to note before we get into this discussion that the way to look at this process is we're at the very beginning," said School Committee member James Leary, who chairs the facilities subcommittee. "It's like the first or second inning of a baseball game. Even after the full committee recommends a draft report, the full report has to come out. Then, the (City Council) has to look at options and financing and MSBA will ultimately weigh in. We're very far from implementing this. We have a significant amount of time to go, a lot more work to do, many more city and state agencies have to weigh in. A lot of changes will be made to these recommendations based on geographic and financial circumstances."

A brief discussion took place between School Committee member David Conway and Mayor Patrick Murphy, who chairs the School Committee, over Conway's request that the City Council be notified as early as possible of the recommendations.

Murphy said it was communicated to the City Council at Tuesday night's meeting that the OMR Architects draft report had been posted to the website.

Conway said, "All I'm asking is all the players get the information ahead of time. We know that games can be lost in the first or second inning."

Leary said the reason the information has not been disseminated is because up until Wednesday night's meeting, the recommendations were still being discussed without any formal votes being taken. Now that the School Committee voted to support the draft recommendations, Leary said other interested parties will be brought into the discussion.

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